Hardened crusts of colors, artificial sedimented rocks, sudden layers of chaos,
ambiguous emergence of trying to force its way through fragments, but also
clean, shining blocks from the hand of an axe. Tattooed skin, flea markets,
burnt frames, glass beads, melancholy attempted by panic, anxiety, yet only
the undying night waiting for the light and reasons. Demon of memories that
I cannot express, as they persist the sight, before words, the language, before
its own identity. Fear. Autonomy of industrial colours in cans, their chemical
reactions, consistency, slow, its very slow calcification, that often forces me to
its tearing. I admire their spatial compactness, exapansivity. Live... You are
what you are... I manipulate by identifying objectivity, full of own obscurity,
scorn and doubt, aware of the necessity of transcendence.
Jiří David 2011

There is always something important worth painting.
Martin Dostál
In art, there is always something that outlives its time and its creators. A lot of it, however, falls into cracks of oblivion. Jiří David does

White series from the years of 1986 and 1987, with a stylistic born development and fragmented layered painting, of which he came of after

not create for the afterlife, but solely for the now. Presented here are his most recent works of his painted series, which he painted in the

his barbaric years. Of all the cycles of all of his work David bases his work so he is able to diverge to his up-to-date modern and original

last two years at his new studio in Zbraslav. For sometime now Jiri David has kept these works hidden from the inquisitive, so he could

compositions.

show the work all at once, after its completion. The work consists of a series of paintings of medium and large formats, and with that also
two works, that are something of a painting-relief-object, and yet still again I realize, how Jiri David is a contemporary artist, from which

For this series, David concentrates mainly on the formal aspects of the composition, without losing its essence and meaning of focus.

many aspects will live on to eternity.

Mostly abstract in nature, the paintings however reflect on Davids grounds, which is the shifting between the image of the norm, finding
the beauty in the aestheticized grotesque and exploring the potential and power of the painted image. David experiments with different
techniques, the types of colours, exploring neo-modernist informalities, jumping to minimalist extremes, with great gusto compositions,

Sometimes it seems that all of Jiří David‘s work in its own way is a memory and reflection of the future. With its volatile uncertainty, its con-

an element that runs through his work and many of his paintings from the late 80s. Assemblage is an essential feature and characteristic of

fusion, with overlapping themes and meanings, its calming chaos, its provocative aestheticism, its timelessness for me, makes it the quality

David’s work, they are polluted and aesthetically awe-inspiring, logically emerging from pseudo-informalities, its fragment materiliatiza-

of the work it is today. It is the feeling and look of the work in which future archaeologists of art will condemn or refine to be known of our

tion defines and creates the texture of the painting. These assemblages form into objects and installations, changing back again to the two

time. This is also why his newest works are convoluted in a Davidovsky timely and timeless manner. He is focused and distracted, intimate

dimensional form of image on canvas. The composition reveals itself out of its context, into a different or new form of contextualization.

and impersonal, fragmented and integrated, authentic and derived. It seems to me that David’s visual concepts are a continuous process of

At the same time, each of David’s paintings are a polemic of undertones of hidden ideas and meanings, a shift of aesthetics. This moment is

emergence and sometimes also dwindling, a single unique work that changes in the quiver of personal emotions and experience of revoke

a fundamental part of David’s mentality, the questioning of “desecration” on the canvas appears already in one David’s juvenile paintings,

and grief, social depression and compression. There are external reactions into ones human life, in which the actor has frequent attempts

‘Under the sun’, 1967

of loss of conjunctions of personal and artistic integrity in the seemingly pragmatic behavior of our Czech and world history. Enervating
contrasts of the internal and the onlooker however, is the originating ground of David’s art that is of such tension to the breaking point of
conflict of the lived and aesthetic, because in the end everything ultimately melds into one.

David, like a true artist, is also a master of color. He is able to find the perfect tone and intensity, understanding its possibility in meaning
and connotation, he understands its limits, how to soften the color to black or white, diminish adverse shades, utilizing the “creaminess”of
the surface and drip-run effect of the paint. He avoids over-use in color, but it is still one of the integrating elements and features of his

Currently Jiří David, who despite in all manner of conceptual divergence to objects, installations, texts and photography is after all, pri-

work and style. It’s of no surpise that one of his key works in his new series are two works of which the canvases are filled with little paper

marily a painter – as is his life choice since childhood, he created paintings, in which he tries to be fresh with attack but also immersed

boxes of hardened paint. This not only shows that David searches for new and different ways of working and painting, but also through

with wise experience. His own experiences, which he does not allow to be pushed aside, distinctly integrates into his canvases. It is as if

„dead“color systematically arranged in rows of boxes – caskets revealing his life-skepticism of the possibilites of art. David moves between

David wanted to create an excellent part of his endless series of art, where he consolidates older happenings, so that he can make them

the state of dreaming and awakening in his paintings. Processing personal experiences, memories, fragments of media and visual percep-

more inticing the next time. In his new collection of work in spite of his diversity there is a compact consisteny. In a way, it theoretically

tions in the overlapping sequence of chaotic continuous flow, which is exposed. These fragments organize the painting, as evident traces

and formally synthesizes and fragments his previous series of paintings, like those of Home, Brutal abstractions, paintings from the exhibi-

of these sensations, which perhaps adhere to the artists mind, but are still the basis of creation of the flesh of art. He organizes his motives

tion Laskavost in Gallery Špala from1995, or large-size format work presented at the Wannieck Gallery in 2007 and an associated two-part

in an obsessive desire to paint in all rage of ways, with the vibrant medium that allows but also forbids. For us and for himself, for now

publication entitled Do not go, leave and I will not remember, it is dangerous! But we should also take into consideration his Black and